MATTHIAS BITZER

Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to announce Matthias Bitzer’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

For over a decade, Bitzer has been experimenting with diverse combinations of sculpture, drawing, and painting to expand upon the discursive possibilities of various mediums, styles, and genres.

Often conceived of as single, sprawling installations, each of Bitzer’s exhibitions encompasses a range of disparate elements that consist of personal, historical, fictional, and imaginary references, that in tandem create a network of shifting meditations upon the nature of time and space. The precision of Bitzer’s placement of his works within the exhibition context is a central and continuous theme and strategy that speaks to the artist’s deep fascination with the physical and perceptual relationship between objects, expression, and their surrounding space.

Continuing to expand upon his formal and conceptual strategies of engagement, Bitzer looks to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s modernist short story, Quadraturin, as a loose framework for a new series of works that circulate around the author’s allegory of radical alienation. Bitzer further mines the possibilities of temporal and spatial dissolution explored in recent works through using the narrative’s interlocking motifs of increasing psychological and physical distortion as a nexus point between description and depiction, word and object.

Through the shifting antagonism, harmony, sincerity and artifice of each of Bitzer’s individual works, he generates an unsettling and immersive environment that not only contemplates the fragile boundaries between image and text, truth and fiction, experience and fantasy, but also the very process of reification itself.

For this exhibition, Bitzer will present a selection of new sculptural and wall works, consisting of drawing, painting, and collage, as well as a site-specific installation that together offer a glimpse into the artist’s profound engagement with the nature of space as a manipulatable, mutable, and ever elusive element. Using Krzhizhanovsky’s narrative to loosely imbue each work with a referent, Bitzer plays with the commingling notions of abstraction and figuration, moving deftly between each terrain.

Augusta Joyce
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